Rob Silversmith

I am an Assistant Professor at Emory University.

From 2021-2025 I was a Zeeman Lecturer at the University of Warwick. I spent 2018-2021 as a Zelevinsky postdoc at Northeastern University, and a year as a postdoc at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University.

I got my Ph.D. in 2017 from the University of Michigan, advised by Yongbin Ruan. Before that, I was an undergraduate at Williams College in western Massachusetts, and before that, I attended Clinton Central Schools in upstate New York.

My main research area is algebraic geometry -- the geometry of polynomial equations -- particularly the more combinatorial aspects. I am particularly interested in moduli spaces, i.e. geometric objects whose points correspond to some other geometric objects. (For example, the upper half-space in R^3 is the moduli space of circles in R^2: the two horizontal coordinates in R^3 encode the position of the center of a circle, while the vertical coordinate encodes the radius.) Studying the structure of a moduli space often gives new insights about the objects being encoded. My favorite moduli spaces tend to be those related in some way or other to Riemann surfaces.

My work has connections to many other areas, including string theory, geometric rigidity theory, graph theory, algebraic combinatorics, and dynamics. My Ph.D. thesis was on Gromov-Witten theory.

My mathematical style tends to involve doing lots of examples --- in algebraic geometry this usually means working explicitly with polynomials. I also gravitate towards projects that involve gathering data via computer computations, then making and proving conjectures based on the data.

Here is my CV.

Contact

Email address: rob.silversmith@emory.edu
Office:          100A White Hall
Mailing address: Mathematics and Science Center
Suite W401
400 Dowman Drive
Atlanta, GA 30322